Creators: Justin Raynor, Tianrui Hu, and Colin Keil
Course: Information Visualization: Theory and Applications (Dunne)
Abstract: The complexity of network infrastructure makes it vulnerable to natural disasters, attacks, and technical problems. One solution to this is to deliver cost effective and rapidly deployable communications infrastructure by setting up dynamic and ad hoc networks. However, it’s challenging for network engineers and operators to determine the optimal setup and monitor the network status to guarantee the coverage of an affected area and the stability of their deployed network. At present, our partner makes use of only very limited visualization tools, to review the placement of nodes, and standard network traffic tools. There is significant room for improvement in this area, because there are a number of more unique challenges, such as monitoring battery levels in critical remote nodes, needing to triage node failures based on a variety of importance criteria, monitoring sensor information, or keeping track of mobile nodes and other types of heterogeneous platforms. To address these problems, we have built a set of interactive visualizations, coupling geographic information, sensor data, and network metadata. These visualizations are incorporated into a web based dashboard that allows users to carry out a range of specific and more general analysis task.
View full digital artifact here.